Codename Panzers: Cold WarReview

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It's NATO versus the Warsaw Pact in this enjoyable but unsurprising sequel.

By Steve Butts

With the recent release of Relic's Dawn of War 2 and Creative Assembly's Empire: Total War, it's a good time to be a strategy gamer. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a great time to be a competing strategy game. Such is the case with Atari's Codename Panzers: Cold War, an enjoyable yet unexceptional entry in StormRegion's long-running series. There's still plenty of fun to be had here, for sure, but there simply aren't enough surprises and improvements for gamers who played the other games in the series.

Codename Panzers: Cold War picks up during the aftermath of World War 2. Tensions are high in occupied Germany between the NATO forces in the West and the Soviets in the East. After an accidental mid-air collision between a Russian MIG and an Allied cargo plane, the player is thrust into an all-out war between the two superpowers. Over the course of 18 missions, the player will lead small groups of infantry and armor in a variety of locations throughout Eastern Europe.

The series breaks past the Second World War to focus on the next conflict.

The missions follow the pattern of the earlier Codename Panzers games. The player takes part in local battles across a range of environments, from snowy mountain passes to fortified islands to crowded dockyards. Mission objectives are generally clear and direct and focus on capturing and occasionally defending key locations. The best of the missions switch back and forth between attack and defense, giving the player a chance to assault an objective, and then immediately turning around to fend off a vicious counter-attack. A wide range of optional and even secret objectives give players lots of smaller goals to achieve along the way.

Unfortunately, there seems to be less variety here among some of the main mission goals than in previous Codename Panzers games. Sure, there are the odd escort or infiltration missions, but the real focus here is on capturing points of interest. It's been a while since I played the previous games in the series, but I remember that many of their missions made the player feel like part of a larger battle. With one thrilling exception, none of the missions here have you fighting alongside any substantial friendly forces.

I got a little over two-thirds of the way through the campaign before the crash bugs convinced me to give up entirely. Normally, I'd have slogged my way through, saving the game every few minutes so as not to lose too much time. But when the game actually started eating my saves with every crash to the desktop, I decided to call it a day. I understand that the missions towards the end offer a handful of surprises but the prospect of replaying large parts of some of the missions over and over again was too discouraging. These crash bugs are likely to be fixed in the future but that's not going to help anyone who wants to play the game in its first week of release.

There are fewer units to choose from here, but the upgrades give them more variety.

As in previous games of the series, there are options for cooperative multiplayer play in a handful of scripted missions, but no options to play through the entire campaign with a friend. The front end of the service is attractive enough, but what we really want is to go through the entire game with a friend backing us up.

In contrast to the Sudden Strike series of games, Codename Panzers has always focused on quality over quantity when it comes to your units and it seems like the selection is even more narrow this time around. In Cold War, players will have find themselves leading a dozen or so units from the NATO armories, from light tanks like the Bulldog all the way up to the massive M-103s. You can pay to add a handful of interesting upgrades to many of the vehicles as well, giving your Pattons an anti-air gun or outfitting your APCs with field repair kits and amphibious modifications. These upgrades make it a bit easier to tailor the small unit rosters to your liking, so you can have a few Bulldogs with anti-infantry flamethrowers and a few with regular cannons.

A wide range of combat infantry, including mine-laying engineers, hole-digging rangers and signal-jamming commandos help enlarge the player's tactical options in several interesting ways. When selecting your troops before a battle, or ordering them as reinforcements in the midst of the action, you can even equip them with special weapons, so you can boost the effectiveness of each unit with the addition of flamethrowers, bazookas or mortars. Your infantry units can even create unique structures to make impromptu guard towers, repair yards or hospitals just behind your front lines.